John Forte

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This collects the Legion's legendary original appearance, a smattering of guest appearances across various titles, and then the beginning of its ongoing run in Adventure Comics. I had read a few of these stories before (their original appearance, the death of Lightning Lad) but not most of them, and as both a literary scholar and a continuity nut, what interested me here—far more than the actual contents of the stories to show more be honest—was the way in which the Legion concept evolved and mutated as it was first established. There was absolutely no intention, originally, of making it into an ongoing thing... and how that would come about is not very straightforward!

It all begins with Adventure Comics #247 (Apr. 1958), where Cosmic Boy, Saturn Girl, and Lightning Boy (as he was then) come back in time to invite Superboy to join the Legion of Super-Heroes. Because this in the 1950s, and these Superboy stories for some reasons love for the characters to be assholes, they set up an initiation test for him that they purposefully rig to fail. At the end, they say, "it proved you're a super-good sport, taking it all with a smile!" I once read this aloud to my six-year-old, and they didn't understand why Superboy just wouldn't say why he couldn't complete the initiation tests (he had a legitimate reason every time), or why the Legion would do this to them.

Other members of the Legion appear in crowd shots, but only a couple are ever in focus, on the final panel of page 11. One seems to be Brainiac 5, but apparently he had white skin in the original printing of this story; the Grand Comics Database tells me this character was recolored to look like Colossal Boy when the story was reprinted in Superman Annual #6 (Winter 1962/63). It's not clear to me when he was first recolored to look like Brainiac 5; the GCD first mentions the recoloring in its entry on this volume, but I can see that in the interim, it was also reprinted in DC Special Blue Ribbon Digest #1 (Mar./Apr. 1980) and Adventure Comics #491 (Sept. 1982).

Anyway, it took over eighteen months for the Legion to reappear, in Adventure #267 (Dec. 1959). While their first story was written by Otto Binder, this one is by Jerry Siegel, and you can see that Sigel closely studied the first Legion story, in that once again, the three Legion founders turn up and act like assholes: they deliberately upstage Superboy so that he feels isolated and lonely and flies away from the Earth, enabling them to trick him into going to a planet with a kryptonite prison, where they lock him up so that he cannot commit crimes they saw him perform five years hence on the "futurescope." (Surely it should be the pastscope, because these events would occur 995 years earlier for the Legion!) Like a lot of comics stories from this era, once has the feeling Jerry Siegel made it up as he went along. Superboy escapes the prison because a trophy on the planet explodes, "launching an atomic chain reaction" the causes the collapse of the kryptonite prison; the chain reaction also releases the element "sigellian," which is poisonous to the Legionnaires, so Superboy shouts loud enough to change its molecular structure, rendering it harmless. At that exact moment, Saturn Girl happens to hear a radio transmission from Earth where the U.S. president releases Superboy from his oath of silence, allowing Superboy to finally explain that he didn't commit those crimes five years in the future but just then (the futurescope was miscalibrated), and they weren't really crimes, but things he was asked to do by the U.S. government!

Like Jesus Christ, could this chain of events be any more contrived and nonsensical? There are repeated references to the planet being built by a group of superheroes along with the Legion, who we see in some crowd shots; I kind of think Siegel missed that the Legion was from the future because there's only one quick reference to a time-bubble, which I feel like could have been added by an editor. Anyway, it seems like the first Legion story was a success, but the perception was that what people really liked about it was the Legion being jerks to Superboy for contrived reasons, so they just told that same story again. I did really like the art by George Papp, though, which is more expressive than normal for the era.

The Legion wouldn't appear in another Superboy story for over another year, but in the interim they did pop up in a Supergirl story, in Action Comics #267 (Aug. 1960). Once again, it emulates the original story, this time by having the three original Legionnaires pop up to tease Supergirl that they know her secret identity, before bringing her to the future to undergo an initiation test, which she ends up failing. (Here because red kryptonite causes her to turn into an adult, rendering her too old for Legion membership; rather than, say, help her, the Legion just dumps her into the past, where luckily she soon de-ages.)

The story is the first to give us new, named Legionnaires: Colossal Boy, Invisible Kid, and Chameleon Boy. What's also noteworthy here is a fact that later stories would eventually ignore: the Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl, and Cosmic Boy who meet Supergirl here are in fact the children of the ones Superboy met; I guess the idea was that the Legion was always travelling exactly one thousand years into the past, and while Superboy is Superman when he was a boy, Supergirl was the adult Superman's contemporary, and thus from a generation later. Eventually, though, this would be streamlined and retconned away, so that these were the same three Legionnaires Superboy originally met, and indeed, my understanding is that at some point it was established that from the Legion's perspective, Action #267 actually preceded Adventure #247, so that the Legion actually recruited Supergirl first. I am not sure when or why this was done.

After this, we get a string of minor appearances, lacking the full Legion. In Superboy #86 (Jan. 1961), Lightning Lad cameos in a story about Superboy battling Lex Luthor, seemingly just there to point out that he is yet another "L.L." in Clark Kent's life. Then in Adventure #282 (Mar. 1961), we get the first story that actually substantively uses a new member of the Legion, when Star Boy chases super-criminals back in time, and Lana Lang decides to date him in a failed attempt to make Superboy jealous. We spend a lot of time here on Star Boy's home planet of Xanthu in the future, which I don't remember seeing much about in later stories. It has two noteworthy aspects: it's first story to really expand on the Legion's future world, and it also deviates from the Adventure #247 formula, so clearly writer Otto Binder was putting some thought into what people liked about the Legion stories. But also it has Chamelon Boy as a Legion member in Superboy's time, so Binder seemingly missed that Chamelon Boy was from a generation later according to Action #267. Or, I guess, this Chameleon Boy is that Chamelon Boy's parent! Either way, the confusing nature of having two Legions both a millennium hence but a generation apart is pretty obvious, and is already causing problems.

Supergirl goes into the future again in Action #276 (May 1961); this is the story that sees her gain Legion membership, alongside Brainiac 5, in his first appearance. Is Brainiac 5's appearance here the reason for retconning Supergirl to predate Superboy in the Legion, so as to line up with Brainiac 5's appearance in the reprints of Adventure #247? Anyway, this story is pretty dumb but I guess you have to hand it to Jerry Siegel for coming up with a clever spin on a villain with Brainiac 5.

I'm not totally going story by story here, but Legion lore develops in a really significant way with Superman #147 (Aug. 1961), the first story where the adult Superman meets the Legion. In this story, Lex Luthor reaches out into the future to discover that just as there's a Legion of Super-Heroes, there's also a Legion of Super-Villains. I hadn't realized that the LSV (do people call them that?) first appeared in a Superman story—but that's the reason they're adults, I guess, because they come from one thousand years in Superman's future, and thus the era where the Legionnaires are grown up. The Legionnaires appear here, too, and since they're relatively contemporary to Superman, they are also grown up.

The collapsing of the two Legion eras into one somewhat happens in Adventure #290 (Nov. 1961), which establishes how Sun Boy joined the Legion—we saw him get rejected at the tryouts in Action #276, a Supergirl/Superman-era Legion story, but now he's in the Superboy-era Legion. Was this on purpose? Was the unknown writer just confused? (I should also note that many of these early Legion stories indicate only one person can join the Legion per year, but later timelines would indicate all of these happened over the first year of the Legion. Which makes sense as a retcon; there are so many members now that the founding members couldn't be teenagers if there really was one new member per year!)

(One should also note that for many of the stories here, the Legion is said to be from the twenty-first century, not the thirtieth. Not sure why this happened, except maybe carelessness. In one of the stories to mention the twenty-first century, we're also told evolutionary processes have happened since Supergirl's time. I mean, I know one thousand years isn't enough for that, but certainly one hundred aren't!)

I think the last story to clearly have the two different Legion time eras is Action #289 (June 1962). This is a deeply weird story where Supergirl decides Superman needs a woman worthy of him; among the things she tries is taking him to the time of the adult Legion, to see if Saturn Woman could be it. (She's not, because she's married to Lightning Man... that says, she allows Superman to give her two really deep kisses anyway!) This story has Superman and Supergirl devise the flying belts that replace the rocket packs the Legion used in earlier stories... but the flying belts continue to appear in Superboy-era Legion stories after this.

We also get the first Legion of Super-Pets story in Adventure #293 (Feb. 1962); I hadn't realized that in Comet the Super-Horse's original appearance, he was picked up from Supergirl's relative future, as he hadn't actually been introduced in the Supergirl stories yet!

After appearing once in 1958, once in 1959, once in 1960, five times in 1961, and four times in early 1962, the Legion got an ongoing feature in Adventure #300 (Sept. 1962), the first six installments of which appear here. Adventure #301 (Oct. 1962) is the first Legion story with no Supergirl or Superboy or Superman, the first to purely take place in the future era, indicating that DC saw what the appeal of these characters really was. Adventure #302 (Nov. 1962) is the first where there's no specific reason for Superboy coming to the future, he just zips in to hang out with the Legion.

That the Legion was on ongoing concern is very clearly demonstrated by the second-last story collected here, Adventure #304 (Jan. 1963), where Saturn Girl is elected Legion leader and Lightning Lad dies. Here we see that adventures can have real, meaningful consequences. Also, this is the establishment of Saturn Girl's practical, ruthless side—she is one of my favorite Legionnaires. Manipulating her way to become Legion leader so she can save everyone else's life! Amazing. Along the same lines, we do get the saga of Mon-El, who first appears in a non-Legion story included here, Superboy #89 (June 1961), where he is trapped in the Phantom Zone, and then reappears in Adventure #300, where he temporarily gets out, and then he permanently gets out in #305. Disconnected from the need of superhero comics to be in an eternal present, the Legion can develop and change over time.

These stories, as my comments probably indicate, are generally not very sophisticated, in either art or story, though I did generally appreciate the work of George Papp. But there are a multitude of character and concepts here that would provide fertile ground for what has been sixty years of stories thus far. I am glad to finally dive back into these earliest tales, and I look forward to seeing the Legion continue to develop when I get to volume 2. show less

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Whenever I dip back into the pre-Great Darkness Saga adventures of the Legion of Super-Heroes, I'm like, this is what people look back on so fondly? Even by the standards of 1960s superhero comics, I would argue, most of these stories are dismal and dull and daft.

The dominant writers of the period, Edmond Hamilton and Jerry Siegel, are obsessed with plots where it seems like the Legionnaires have turned against one another: show more the stories collected in this volume include leader Sun Boy* going nuts from space fatigue and the Legion having to take him down, the Legion imprisoning Lightning Lad for revealing their secrets to their enemies, the female Legionnaires seducing and eliminating the men under the influence of evil women from the planet (I shit you not) Femnaz, five Legionnaires traveling back in time solely to screw over Superboy by revealing his secret identity, and short-lived member Command Kid turning the Legionnaires against each other. Each plot is more contrived than the previous, and the Femnaz one is ridiculously awful: the women of Femnaz destroy their planet's men because the men try to clamp down on violent arena games and won't let them shoot rockets at the moon. They see the error of their ways when they crack their moon in half with some of their rockets, and the male Legionnaires put it back together for them. Uh huh.

Almost without exception, these stories can only be liked for the potential they possess, rather than the actual ideas in them. A good case in point is the Time Trapper, a rare example of a genuine story arc in this series. He's mentioned in a couple stories as a contrived way to get the overly poweful Superboy and Mon-El out of the action, but he intrigues nevertheless: because of the "Iron Curtain of Time" he's created, the Legion can't pass beyond their own time period, no matter how hard the more powerful Legionnaires try. But the way this plot plays out is a bit silly. After a few mentions of this Iron Curtain of Time, the Legion considers using a never-before-mentioned superweapon, the Concentrator, against the Time Trapper. They decide not to do it, but having mentioned this device to the Science Police Chief, he decides they must be put through rigorous psychological evaluations to see if they'll break and reveal its existence and function to outsiders under pressure. The S.P. Chief turns out to be the Time Trapper in disguise, and they foil his plan using the Concentrator, but he escapes back into the future beyond the Iron Curtain of Time. The next story is all about the Legion making preparations to track the Time Trapper down... but they never actually do this, and he's not mentioned again in this volume. The Time Trapper's name intrigues, as does the idea of the futuristic Legion having an enemy from even further in the future, but the stories using him are dumb.

This is especially so of the story where the Legion is preparing to track him down. They're so desperate they call in the Legion of Super-Pets from the twentieth century: Krypto the Super-Dog, Comet the Super-Horse, Streaky the Super-Cat, and Beppo the Super-Monkey. Chameleon Boy's pet, Proty II, gets jealous and demands a position on the team, but because Proty doesn't have any superpowers, they make him do a try-out to demonstrate he can make the cut anyway. There are a lot of problems with this. The first is that Proty is seemingly as sentient as any Legionnaire; he seems to have been designated a "pet" solely because his natural form is of a small blob instead of a humanoid. The second is that any of the "pets" count as pets, since they all seem to be capable of reason and communication. The last is that being a shapeshifting telepath somehow isn't enough a superpower to qualify Proty for membership in the Legion of Super-Pets, even though his "master" Chameleon Boy gets to be in the Legion of Super-Heroes on virtue of just being a shapeshifter and not a telepath! In a later story, Proty sets up a puzzle to determine the Legion leader, one that only one member of the Legion can even solve, yet he's somehow still just a pet. Space racism at work, I guess.

You can see how many of the stories here had potential that was picked up by later writers: the Heroes of Lallor, four super-teens from a planet ruled by a dictatorship, would recur now and again, and their tale is one of the better here. (A villain manipulates the Heroes of Lallor and the Legion into seeing each other as enemies, but understanding and compassion win the day.) I was fascinated to see the debut of Lone Wolf, the hero later known as Timber Wolf; he eventually becomes something of a savage loner, but here he's as whitebread as all the other Legionnaires. And though his actual plan was dumb, I loved the idea of Lex Luthor travelling into the future and pretending to be a pre-evil Lex by wearing a wig to earn the trust of the Legion in order to kill them just because they're friends with Superboy/man. So there's some potential here, but most of it isn't delivered on.

Also: what's up with the Bouncing Boy subplot? He gets his powers removed by mistake in an aside in one issue, and they're temporarily restored for mere minutes in another. Like, I can't even work out what motivates these little snippets because he hadn't even done anything in the book before he showed up to have his powers eliminated.

* Continuity is never a strong point of the Legion: in Adventure Comics #318 (Mar. 1964) and #319 (Apr. 1964), Sun Boy is leader; in Adventure #323 (Aug. 1964), Saturn Girl is up for re-election as leader. Saturn Girl had previously been elected leader in Adventure #304 (Jan. 1963), so it seems like Jerry Siegel forgot about #318-19 when writing #323. We could assume, however, that there was an unseen election between #319 and #323-- after how disastrously Sun Boy's leadership went in #318 (and #319 wasn't exactly a shining hour, either), it would make sense for there to be an election and for an established safe hand like Saturn Girl to be reelected. What weirds me out is not the fault of this book though: none of the on-line lists I can find of Legion leaders include Sun Boy, which seems an odd thing for the detail-oriented Legion fans to miss. show less

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This volume continues on from volume 1, establishing the Legion of Super-Heroes as a regular ongoing feature; it contains the Legion stories from issues #306 to 317 of Adventure Comics, plus one story from Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen guest-starring the Legion. All of the regular Legion stories are written by Edmond Hamilton (husband of Leigh Brackett, fact fans), usually with art by John Forte. We can see that the Legion show more has bedded in as the regular concept we now recognize. Though the early stories here claim they come from the twenty-first century, it soon switches to the thirtieth and stats there. Beyond that, we get key concepts like the idea of Legion tryouts, the Legion of Substitute Heroes, the debut of Proty (and then Proty II), the resurrection of Lightning Lad, the first mention of the Time Trapper, Phantom Girl's thing for Ultra Boy, Star Boy's thing for Dream Girl, and so on. Overall I found this a solid set of Legion stories that really show how it can work as an ongoing concept; I reread my review of volume 3 (into which this ones leads) before writing this one, and I was I quite grumpy about it, writing, "Even by the standards of 1960s superhero comics, I would argue, most of these stories are dismal and dull and daft." Well, maybe Hamilton's early days were better than his later ones, or maybe I was just in a bad mood back in 2016, because I didn't think this was great literature, but I did enjoy it for what it was. Maybe it was interesting because you can see the Legion concept developing, as was the case in volume 1, whereas that wasn't really a factor later on.

In any case, here are some notes and highlights. Like I said above, this volume contains the debut of the Legion of Substitute Heroes, and in fact two other stories focused on them. Obviously I know about them from later stories, but this was my first time reading their debut. I can see why people glommed onto them, they are actually quite charming. Polar Boy, Night Girl, Stone Boy, Fire Lad, and Chlorophyll Kid are all rejected at Legion tryouts, but remain so dedicated to the Legion that they decide to form a back-up group for the Legion. (Legion rejects get flying belts, which seems kind of over-the-top, but maybe flying belts are a dime a dozen in the thirtieth century.) What really makes the story shine is Polar Boy's determination to make the Subs work as a group; they keep trying to help the Legion but are unneeded, but Polar Boy knows if they don't prove useful sometime, his new friends will fall apart.

The other highlight for the Subs is the one where the Legion creates a contest to admit one Sub. It's neat to see them use their crappy powers cleverly, and it's charming both that Stone Boy wins because of his motivation, not his powers, and that he turns down the offer so he can stay with his friends. You can see why these characters would make an impression on the readers, and why later writers would keep going back to them.You might think that someone handed a cast of characters with (I believe) eighteen members might think to themselves that that's enough, but not Edmond Hamilton, who introduces three more Legionnaires here: Element Lad, Lightning Lass, and Dream Girl. Element Lad's is okay, more an excuse for a scientific mystery than a new character (and I don't think he really does much in the rest of the volume).

Lightning Lass's is interesting; I had never read her debut story before, though I was familiar with the broad strokes from later stories: joins while her brother is dead, gets her powers changed. What I hadn't known was exactly how this all happens, and I was actually surprised. I've read the story where Lightning Lad is resurrected before, but it was an awful long time ago, so when Lightning Lad was seemingly resurrected I thought it really was him. It turns out to be his sister disguising herself as her dead brother. Sun Boy figures it out but plays along; the Bierbaums would later make him into kind of an entitled player, but here he's a good guy, helping her out covertly (or at least he thinks he is, because he doesn't know she has lightning powers too). I'm a bit surprised they didn't pick up on the cross-dressing angle later on, as Lightning Lass makes a very successful boy.

Later, after Lightning Lad comes back to life, she continues in the Legion. I knew she got her powers switched later on, to control of gravity (thus making her "Light Lass") but I had figured it was by accident or something. It's actually done deliberately by Dream Girl in her debut story (who knew it was so easy to change someone's superpowers? who knew someone who take their powers being changed so easily?), because the Legion doesn't permit member to have identical powers. Lightning Lad came back to life in Adventure #312, and the power swap happens in #317. I'm assuming they got letters from earnest fans who noted the contradiction because no one in the intervening stories notes the issue.

Speaking of Dream Girl, she doesn't join up permanently in her debut, but she immediately makes an impression, both in terms of her physical attributes (the subplot about all the boys swooning for her is hilarious) but also in terms of her cleverness, using her powers to try to save the Legion's life without threatening the timeline. Dream Girl is one of my faves, so I was delighted to see this story. If I'm not mistaken, it would be a long time before she returned, not until a story collected in volume 5.

And speaking of long gaps between appearances, Star Boy was one of the very first Legionnaires we learned about, in Adventure #282, but then promptly disappeared, appearing in no other Legion stories for over two years, until #310 (collected here). He finally does something of note in the Dream Girl story, though it's mostly falling for her. During his run, Paul Levitz would explain this long absence, as well as Thom's changing powers, in one of my favorite Legion stories. Another story that later writers would do a lot with is Adventure #316, where Ultra Boy goes on the run... though of course he turns out to have good reasons for it that he can't tell anyone about.

Chamelon Boy's "pet," the seemingly sentient, telepathic, shapeshifting blob named Proty, makes his debut in #308, the story where Lightning Lass debuts... and dies in #312, just four issues later, sacrificing his life so that Lightning Lad can come back to life. But Proty II debuts immediately thereafter, without fanfare, in Jimmy Olsen #72. Jimmy identifies someone disguised as him as Proty (how he does this, I don't know, because there's no story where Jimmy meets Proty), but he's corrected by Chameleon Boy: "Actually, it's 'Proty II', a friend of my first protean pet, who died when he sacrificed his life for Saturn Girl!" And that's it! I wonder if Jimmy Olsen #72 was mostly done when someone informed its writer/editor that Proty had been killed off, so they had to add this comment at the last minute... and thus a whole new character was born! When Proty II pops up in Adventure for the first time, it's with no more explanation.

Obviously a lot of these stories are ridiculous (e.g, the one where Supergirl fights her own duplicate, who turns all the female Legionnaires pink), but the place of honor has to be set aside for the one where a criminal sneaks into their clubhouse and steals a time bubble... so that he can team up with Emperor Nero, John Dillinger, and Adolf Hitler ("the three wickedest men in history"), transferring their brains into the bodies of Superboy, Mon-El, and Ultra Boy to create super-criminals. I am not so sure you would see Hitler treated so casually these days; funny that he gets taken more seriously the further away we get from him. show less

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The beginning of this volume actually sets up three ongoing mysteries for the Legion. Saturn Girl mentions two pieces of unfinished business: "the Time-Trapper, the scientific criminal who escaped into the future" and "the unsolved mystery of the vanishing world [...] swarm[ing] with monsters." Chameleon Boy adds a third, "the recent deluge of hardened space criminals reforming and surrendering." As far as I know, this is show more the first mention of the mystery planet and the reforming crooks, but the Time Trapper bedeviled the Legion multiple times in volume 3. The Time Trapper ends up being the only one of these elements to come up again; if multiple recurring plots were being set up, they didn't pay off within the next year despite Saturn Girl's intentions.

Not that intentions count for much. The Legion doesn't finally defeat the Time Trapper because of anything they do here (or any of the preparations they undertook in the previous volume), but because he decides to attack them by sending a minion with a de-aging weapon, from which they are saved by the most contrived of circumstances: the spray from the Fountain of 1,000 Chemicals had something in it that "must've neutralized the Legionnaires' age-regression at infancy." Is having such a thing at a fun fair even a good idea? If these rare chemicals can interfere with the operation of time devices, what are they doing to the bodies of passers-by? (This story also establishes that it's Mother's Day on one page and that it's Halloween-time six pages later. Either the Time Trapper is substantially messing around with time but no one mentions it, or Jerry Siegel is a forgetful writer. You decide which is more plausible.)

I guess you have to appreciate the effort, though. This volume also features the first multi-issue Legion stories I can recall: one about the evil Dynamo Boy taking over the Legion from within, with the help from the Legion of Super-Villains (this is the earliest of their appearances that I've read), and one about the mysterious crime lord Starfinger ("more dangerous than Goldfinger," one cover trumpets; the James Bond film would have come out about a year prior).

Like so many Legion stories of this era, they range from terrible to contrived to terrible and contrived. This volume has less dependence on Legion members behaving erratically (though you still have Lightning Lad pretending to be vengeance-obsessed for somewhat ill-conceived reasons), but still multiple stories where someone in a mask is dramatically revealed as someone else, and the reasoning doesn't stack up. Superboy says he knew it was not Ultra Boy because Ultra Boy can only use one superpower at a time, so he couldn't have both seen through the lead mask with x-ray vision and used other powers, and so he concludes the unknown "boy" must be Supergirl. But as acknowledged on the next page, Supergirl can't see through lead at all, which really undermines his supposed deduction. He should have disqualified her as the suspect too! Lucky for him that red kryptonite had this "weird side effect."

The best part of the book is probably the feeling that the Legion is an ongoing saga, where things and people can change. Lightning Lad loses an arm, and instead of being brushed aside, his mechanical arm comes up in multiple stories. In another story, a Hero of Lallor (introduced in volume 3) goes misanthrope and fights the Legion, only to end up dead, the fact that he'd actually appeared before as a (sort of) hero adding a little bit of pathos. In one story, two pairs of Legionnaires even get married and quit.

Though this of course turns out to be yet another overcomplicated ruse, it sets the stage for what's to come in the 1970s and '80s, where relationships would increasingly dominate the storytelling. show less